


Survival [of the Worthy]

by ZedElla (Leviarty)



Series: Survival + Snippets [5]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 02:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4545891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leviarty/pseuds/ZedElla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We're out of time."</p>
<p>(It’s not actually necessary to have read [Of the Foolish] in order to get the full experience of this, but a few things might make more sense, as this story is heavily based on that one.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survival [of the Worthy]

**Author's Note:**

> McShep is so irrelevant to this story that it isn’t worth tagging, but I think you should be aware that there is mention of it.

Sam was tired.

She looked at the timer on the wall, steadily approaching hour thirty. Tick. Tick. Tick.

She’d been awake for almost two days before that, for what crisis she couldn’t remember.

She popped another stimulant, drowned it with a gulp of cold, stale coffee, then passed the bottle to Bill.

The stims were hardly working anymore, over the years she’d built up a tolerance.

She popped another.

An airman entered the conference room. “Our ships are loaded with all the supplies they can fit,” she informed the scientists around the table, each of them looking more tired than Sam felt. “They’re departing now. We’re out of time.”

None of them made a sound, but it was clear they had given up. They stopped working.

Sam didn’t.

The timer buzzed when it hit hour thirty, but no one moved.

She heard the familiar pounding of feet taking the stairs two at a time.

“It’s time to go,” O’Neill ordered. “Now.”

Wheels rolled, scientists got up. Sam didn’t move.

“Now, Carter,” he said, more forcefully.

“I can figure this out,” she said. God, she was so tired.

“I’m sure you can figure it out, but it’s too late. We have to go,” he said, practically dragging her from the chair. She didn’t fight back.

They were the last to go through the gate, following Bill and the other scientists and a dozen or so personnel who’d been assisting with the evacuations.

She thought her heart might give out, seeing the base empty like this, knowing it was mere minutes from destruction. Fifteen plus years they’d managed to keep the world from falling to their enemies, and in the end it’s their sun that takes them.

 

She didn’t know what base they were on, didn’t really care. The gate room was just shy of empty when they arrived, and she could see only a couple technicians in the control room. Its set up almost like the SGC had been, but located only a couple stories underground – most of the base sat on the surface.

She was on autopilot, following Jack to wherever he was taking her – empty quarters, as it turned out. Some part of her was surprised to find that there were _any_ empty quarters to spare.

“Get some sleep,” he said, kissing her temple.

She tried to argue, but every defense was lost somewhere between her brain and her mouth.

She didn’t think she _could_ sleep, but lay down in the thin, lump mattress, and didn’t remember much of anything after that.

 

She didn’t sleep for long, if her watch was at all accurate; no more than four hours, but once she was awake, she knew sleep wouldn’t come again easily.

She found herself wandering the base aimlessly. Though it paralleled the SGC in many ways, and the halls were lined in the same bleak gray, the same stenciled letters, she found this base to be wholly unfamiliar.

She passed familiar faces, maybe she acknowledged them, she wasn’t sure. Eventually, she found the mess hall, though it more closely resembled the breakroom at the bookstore she’d worked at when she was sixteen. Much too small to accommodate a full base. But then, this base was never meant to sustain large number, it was only a way-station between Earth and everywhere else. Its main purpose had been to support offworld teams in the event that Earth was inaccessible, or who might have been exposed to deadly toxins. Emergency-escape-from-earth was somewhere on the list of intention, but it was low, and never taken too seriously.

She passed a door left slightly open, and heard angry voices coming from inside. She listened for a moment, but couldn’t determine what the argument was concerning.

She moved on.

She walked off the base, onto the surface of whatever planet they were on – she still wasn’t sure. The sun was almost blindingly, and she raised her arm to shield out some of the light.

There were dozens, maybe hundreds of tents, and even more people milling about. She heard frantic voices, and it wasn’t long before someone caught sight of her, and then _everyone_ saw her, and suddenly she’s surrounded by strangers, asking her questions in loud, unforgiving voices.

She didn’t have answers for them, didn’t even really know what they were asking, and she tried to stave them off to no avail.

Eventually someone, or several someones come to her rescue, separating the people from her, and getting her back into the base, where the lights are dull, and no one is yelling.

 

“She’s in shock,” the doctor said, after shining an all too bright light in her eyes several times. “Unsurprising, given the situation.”

Sam didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. She didn’t try to fight the doctor as he lay her down on her side, or injected her with an IV, or put an mask over her face.

She didn’t know when Jack got there, or if he’d been there all along, but he took her hand, held it until she fell asleep.

 

“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked when she woke. He felt her wrist, took her blood pressure, shined the light in her face.

“Okay,” she said, which was maybe a lie, but she certainly felt better than she had.

“Your vitals are looking much better,” he said.

“How long?” she asked.

“We had you in a medically induced coma for two days, to get you through the worst part of the withdrawal you are most likely feeling right now.”

So that’s what that crappy feeling was.

“You’re free to go, but I want you back in here every twelve hours.”

She didn’t say what she was thinking, which was something about unnecessary drain on resources, but left the infirmary in silence.

“Did Doc Connor say you could leave?” Jack asked when she eventually came across him. “Or did you just walk out?”

“He said I was fine to leave. I have to check in though.”

“You feeling okay?”

She shrugged. “Why don’t we pretend I’m fine, and you can tell me everything that’s happened while I was out?”

“Good news first, or bad?”

“Bad.” She would rather have something to look forward to.

“We have a tentative leadership in place, though saying that any of us were elected is a bit of a stretch. There are six of us, and an agreement that Sheppard will make seven.” It didn’t particularly sound like bad news, just news, but Jack’s revulsion for politics made it bad news for him.

“Us?” she asked.

“Yes, yes, laugh it up now, Jack O’Neill is one of the New World Leaders.”

She didn’t laugh, but attempted a smile.

“Don’t ask me how, because I still don’t know. The others are a real pain in the ass, no surprise there, and we’ve done pretty much nothing but argue. We did manage to divvy up territory and resources, so each of the sites has two representatives, until we can set up a more permanent solution. Someone thought the sites needed names, so, welcome to Helios.”

“Helios,” she repeated.

“Two suns. Seemed fitting.”

“Is that the good news?” she asked.

He shook his head. “And now that I think about it, the good news probably isn’t that good. You’ve been put in charge of this base.”

Well, it wasn’t _bad_ news. Just something to add to her never-ending exhaustion.

“That might be temporary too, we’ll see.”

 

They said the evacuations were random, after the initial bunch of SGC and Area 51 personnel, but from looking at the list, she could see it was anything but. It may have given the appearance of randomness, and the people doing the beaming might even have thought they were being arbitrary in their selections. But most of them had been pulled from political centers and universities, and almost exclusively came from well developed nations.

They picked the wealthy, the people who hadn’t ever been required to fend for themselves.

They didn’t pick survivors.

 

She caught Jeannie’s name on a list that came over from Hemera, and demanded that she and her daughter be transferred (demanded politely, because she didn’t know the Russian man who’d been put in charge of Hemera Base, didn’t know how well he would respond to anything she had to say).

 

If she had felt tired before, it was nothing compared to what she felt now.

 

She spent days trying to increase the output of their naquadah generators so they could dial Atlantis, to little avail.

“When was the last time you slept?” Jeannie asked.

Sam shrugged, but allowed herself to be half lifted off the floor.

“We can come back to this tomorrow,” Jeannie said. “You need to sleep.”

It was true, she did. But the moment her head hit the pillow, the moment she was allowed to stop thinking about naquadah generators and food sources and their ever dwindling supplies, she started to think about Earth and all the people she’d left behind.

 

“I reserved a spot for you and Madison on the Daedalus,” she told her. “They leave tomorrow morning, so you should…” Pack, she was going to say, but it’s not as though they had a whole lot of things.

“Thank you,” Jeannie said.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want to go, but… he’ll be glad to see you. If you want to come back here after, that’s-”

“Thank you,” Jeannie said again, hugging her.

 

Daedalus left, and she found herself wishing she’d gone with it.

 

It took far too long, but they were close to building up enough power to dial Pegasus. Enough to dial, and lock on, but not stay connected.

She sat down with a camera and began recording. Everything Atlantis needed to know would have to fit into a few microseconds of compressed data.

She tried to joke, a little, but mostly found herself fiddling with a power chord – she wasn’t even sure where it had come from.

She thought she’d retained remarkable composure, seeing that she felt none, and only had to stop filming twice to keep herself from breaking down. She wondered if it would have been easier, or harder, if she could see John’s face on the other side.

 

She heard someone call for her several times before she finally dug herself out of the equipment she was working on. She knew she was gross, covered in sweat and grease, but when the airman told her Atlantis had called, she hardly cared.

“Damn it’s good to see you guys,” she said, smiling, really, for the first time in what felt like an eternity. She wanted to tell John and Rodney everything, about how terrible everything was, and how exhausted she was, and _everything_. Instead, she somehow made it sound not too bad. Maybe things weren’t always as bad as she thought.

Their call ended too soon, she thought, she needed longer with them, but knew they were all busy, and that even Atlantis didn’t have endless power to burn.

“Next week,” she said, because goodbye felt too permanent.

 

After almost three weeks, and a brief layover on Hyperion, Jack finally returned. She thought she could bury her face in his chest for a week, never let go, but she didn’t. She settled for a smile.

She didn’t feel so exhausted today, but knew her eyes were red and worn.

Jack brought mixed news. The World Leaders agreed to leave Atlantis alone, and further, agreed that each colony would operate independently, with separate governments and laws and whatever they saw fit. Jack and Kiran Sidhu were the de facto leaders of Helios, until things settled enough to create a true government. It was good news, she knew, because Jack is Jack, and Sidhu was the only other World Leader she could stand to be around.

But still her feelings were mixed. She knew, logically, that Atlantis was no place for them as a society, that it posed too many dangers. Still, she wanted more than almost anything to be back there.

She sat through the briefing, listening as Jack and Sidhu talked through everything that had been discussed, the decisions that had been made.

Finally, the briefing ended, and finally she was in her quarters – _their_ quarters, she reminds herself, because this thing wasn’t illegal anymore, really hadn’t been for a long time, but she still often felt like she was breaking rules just by being alone with him.

She wrapped her arms tightly around him and _breathed_ , and never let go.

 

Things got better.

They didn’t always feel better, and sometimes they felt downright awful, but on the whole, she knew things were better.

She slept more, and still worked entirely too much, but most days the world wasn’t ending.

 

Things got complicated, with building a new government from the ground up, and more often than not her work was politics rather than science and aliens and stargate. She hated it, more than she imagine possible, but she pushed through it, and managed to keep Helios Base from being dragged out from under her.

Jack didn’t want anything to do with the building of government, wanted only to retire, _finally_ , but he supported Sidhu and helped to develop some kind of working system that wasn’t complete bullshit given their situation.

 

She missed several calls from Atlantis (Jack had been there to answer them in her stead, and filled her in on the minutia delivered), so seeing John’s face again was maybe the best thing that had happened in weeks.

Atlantis was faring much better than the other colonies, but that came as no surprise to her – they were survivors, always had been. She might have felt a pang of jealousy that she couldn’t be there with them, but mostly she felt pride, that they were doing okay. If only one branch of Terran society managed to survive the fallout from this, she was certain it would be Atlantis.

She let herself say ‘bye’ for the first time, and it didn’t feel like the end of something.

 

She drifted through more political nonsense. They were nearing the end of the window, the point at which all citizenships would be made permanent, at which laws would be officially penned, and leaders would be set. She was tired of it all, but pushed through, argued down the people who knew _nothing_ of what they were talking about.

One day, she thought, things would settle down and people would know everything there was to know about space and the stargate and the universe.

That day was not today.

 

Atlantis missed a call-in.

She assured herself that it wasn’t the end of the world – that had already happened – that Atlantis was just as busy as she was, and reminded herself that they were under no obligation to keep in regular contact, no obligation but a spoken agreement.

They were fine, she told herself.

She didn’t sleep well that night.

 

They don’t call the next day either, and if she was completely honest with herself, she was more than a little concerned. She tried to not let it show.

 

It wasn’t like she was sitting around waiting for them to call. She had work to do, and some of that work was dealing with the commander of Hyperion Base, a young woman who Sam liked, but was wholly unprepared for what the job would entail.

But she may have also been waiting for their call.

She breathed a sigh of relief when the signal came through, then covered up all the worry that had clouded her face the last couple days.

“You’re two days late,” she said.

“ _Sorry about that. We had a busy week, it slipped my mind_.”

“Oh, anything exciting?”

“ _Yes, actually, but you have to promise not to tell the World Leaders_ ,” he replied.

She smiled, drawing a cross over her heart, then sat forward in her chair. If he wanted this kept secret, it had to be something good. And her obligations to the World Leaders were basically nil (she figured whatever it was, she could probably tell Jack safely, but John didn’t have to know that).

He told her about their trip to the edge of the galaxy, the discovery of another Ancient city-ship. She could see how excited he was, despite the fact that he described her as half in ruin, and filled with hundreds more deadly experiments.

Rodney leaned into frame, his hand resting on Sheppard’s shoulder. _“Hi, Sam_ ,” he said.

“Hi, Rodney. John was just telling me the good news.” It seemed a completely innocuous statement, but sparked a rather unexpected reaction.

Not wholly unexpected though, because she’d seen the way they cared for one another, always expected it would one day come to this.

“Congratulations,” she said, a wide smile stretching across her features. There were few situations she found herself in these days that were worthy of total mirth, but this was one.

 

The next time she saw John, it was two weeks later, mere days after the two month adjustment window closed. She didn’t expect a whole lot would change from that point, because they’d mostly settled in and found a working government. Hopefully it would mean she spent less time ferrying World Leaders back and forth – technically the World Leaders no longer existed, there were now three distinct governments in place, and while they considered one another as allies, their talks would no longer deal with the fair and appropriate allocation of resources.

The look on John’s face was one she couldn’t read – he’d always been good at hiding his feelings, so when he did show them, she had no idea what to make of it.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“ _How is your government?_ ” he asked instead of answering. “ _Do you like the arrangement_?”

“I had a hand in setting it up, so yes, I think it’s a good as it possibly can be.”

“ _And relations with the other two colonies?”_

“At this point, they are little more than allies and trading partners. Why do you ask?”

“ _Because I’m torn on what to do. I don’t want to be selfish, but I also don’t want to cause an irreparable rift between Helios and the other colonies. I don’t want Hemera and Hyperion to think Atlantis is playing favorites, even though that’s exactly what we’re doing._ ”

“Playing favorites how?” she asked.

“ _We’ve got our hands on another ZPM. Our senior staff agreed that we are willing to send it to you, to give you the ability to dial us, and maybe help sustain yourselves. But we don’t want to do it if it will cause more problems than it solves, and not if it means your governments are going to start sending people to Atlantis without permission._ ”

“Sidhu has no interest in taking over Atlantis,” she said, shaking her head. “She knows the dangers. And her relationship with the other leaders is strained at best. She would never dream of sharing any more than she has to with them.” Of this, she was certain.

John smiled. “ _That’s all I need to hear. If you will kindly lower your iris, we have a gift to deliver_. _Think you can have it tied into your power grid soon enough to get me home in time for supper?_ ”

She grinned. “I think I can manage that. Iris is open.”

She exited the control room and waited for him in the gateroom. It felt like the longest minute of her life before he finally stepped through, pushing a cart with several boxes.

“It’s good to see you,” he said as she pulled him into a hug.

“You too.” He pulled away, turning her attention to the crates. He opened the first, revealing the glorious ZPM, which she resisted the urge to kiss. He closed it, and opened the basket. “Sampling of Nemoran fruits and vegetables, courtesy of Rodney and the science team,” he said. She looked into the basket, which was filled to the brim with vibrant colors in shapes that looked nothing like what the Milky Way had to offer. The next crate had rows upon rows of carefully arranged seeds. “Our crops are doing exceptionally well, and we thought you might like a hand with yours. All are genetically engineered to thrive in almost any environment.”

“This is incredible,” she said. “I suppose you might like to take some bison on your return trip.”

“Only if you’re offering.”

“Why don’t you help me get the ZPM online, then we’ll see what we can’t do about that.”

 

It was only the beginning, she knew, but the human race was nothing if not resilient, and though things had been rough, tougher than she’d ever thought possible, they had made it this far. They would be okay.

And so would she.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry that the last few parts of this have been so bittersweet (at best). I promise the next installment is like 95% fluff.


End file.
